Out of Thin Air is a Bakery on a Mission
Out of Thin Air is a Bakery on a Mission
Baker Alessandro Jang, creator of the sesame-gochujang sourdough, is just getting started. Up next: croissants.
Photographs by David Gurzhiev
A warm waft of buttery bread trails the baker Alessandro Jang as he opens the door to his compact commissary kitchen in Lincoln Heights. The concrete floors are slippery with flour. Inside, Jessica Eaton-Sicairos and Sage Eaton-Sicairos are pulling trays of Sonora brioche rolls from the deck ovens, which will later be used to make breakfast sandwiches at Open Market in Koreatown. Meanwhile, pastry chef
is continuing to tweak a croissant recipe that she and Jang have been testing for two months. Unlike typical viennoiserie, the croissants contain a significant amount of whole grain, which makes them more flavorful and also more finicky. They are the latest addition to the repertoire of Out of Thin Air, the bakery Jang started in the fall of 2021, and which today caters to 20+ wholesale clients and four weekly farmers’ markets.
For the last several weeks, Mendieta’s croissants have appeared at the Atwater Village Farmers’ Market in four flavors: plain, chocolate, yuzu-almond, and ham-and-gouda. They hit the Out of Thin Air table at around 10 a.m., and within an hour, they’re gone. Once she perfects the recipe, the croissants will be available at the bakery’s other markets (L.A. River Thursdays, Altadena Fridays, and Calabasas Saturdays) in addition to a slew of shops around town. The pursuit is a tricky one, however. Unlike the refined grains used in all-purpose flour, which are stripped of the nutrients that surface more variables, whole grains add density to the dough and soak up moisture, causing chewiness—which Mendieta wants to avoid. “Crunchy air is how I describe the perfect croissant,” she says. “Super flakey, but I’m not chewing on it forever. And super flavorful.”
Out of Thin Air was founded on the premise of highlighting the flavor of whole grains, hence the challenge. But Mendieta is up for the task. Jang sources whole grains, including the Yecora Rojo hard red and the Amarillo hard white they’re using in the croissants, from Camas Country Mill in Eugene, Oregon. At first, Mendieta was using 40% whole grain in her dough, an unprecedented number that she has since slightly dialed down, despite her persistence in making it work. She’s well-known in Los Angeles and on Instagram for her tiered, buttercream-piped, and flower-topped cakes, yet her truest love is for laminated pastries. Viennoiserie requires technical prowess, and Mendieta’s dedicated, obsessive energy in achieving the ideal croissant aligns with the origin story of Out of Thin Air.
Jang, who is Korean, grew up on rice, not bread. He stumbled into sourdough during the pandemic after receiving some starter from a friend working in the kitchen at Doubting Thomas. A recovering heroin addict, he had just gotten out of rehab, where his job was to cook 50 meals three times a day. “I fell in love with serving,” he says. “It feels really great when somebody enjoys what you created.” Soon enough, he was hooked on making bread. His first sales were at House Roots Coffee in Granada Hills, where he was working at the time. “I was baking one loaf a day, every day, and then I started selling it, and it turned into ten loaves a day,” he recalls. House Roots Coffee owner Jimmy Lee became Jang’s mentor, teaching him the ropes of running a business. First, however, he needed more bakery experience, which led to stints at Clark Street, where he met Mendieta, and Bub & Grandma’s, where he worked alongside Jessica and Sage (who are married).
Jang spent the first ten years of his life in Argentina, where his parents ran a textile business. Then they moved to Burbank, followed by Santa Clarita, and in his 20s, he started moving around on his own. “I traveled mostly to not do heroin here. It turns out they have heroin everywhere,” he says, laughing. He lived in Seoul for five years and Germany for a bit. This unique background is something he’s intent on highlighting in his work at Out of Thin Air. “I always wanted to do something a little out of the norm,” Jang says. His signature loaf is a sesame-gochujang boule laced with garlic confit and green onions. It’s become a prized possession amongst Los Angeles food obsessives. And like Mendieta’s croissants, it took a long time to get right.
“There are some traditional people who are like, ‘Why did you do that?’ But this is L.A., L.A. is the place to fuck around.”
Gochujang is made with rice flour, which gets boiled down to a paste with ground peppers and lots of salt. The salt affects the hydration of the bread, while the rice flour, which lacks gluten, affects the structure. “Now I feel really happy with it, but it’s still a really finicky bread. If you over-mix it, you’re fucked. If you under-mix it, you’re fucked. Sourdough is already unforgiving, but this one… you need to repent,” he says. When Jang was a kid, he and his mom would make gochujang together at home. Now, she eats his sesame-gochujang bread with butter, egg, and cheese, and pretends it’s kimchi bokkeumbap (kimchi fried rice).
The deeply savory and richly red bread receives mixed reviews. “There are some traditional people who are like, ‘Why did you do that?’ But this is L.A., L.A. is the place to fuck around,” Jang says. The people who talk the most shit, he adds, are Korean. “But I didn’t grow up in Korea, I grew up in Argentina, and I grew up here. My flavor profile is very mixed. All of us grew up in different traditions and cultures, and we want to include that into our products eventually.” For example, Sage is half-Salvadoran, so they’re talking about making bread with loroco, the perennial plant native to El Salvador.
Beyond the sesame-gochujang loaf, Out of Thin Air’s bread lineup is relatively traditional. They make baguettes, focaccia, country sourdough loaves, rosemary-polenta porridge boules, ciabatta, and olive fougasse. “You don’t want to steer too far away from what works, but why not take the French techniques, respect the roots, and also add a little color to it?” Jang poses. This mentality is a shared trait amongst culinary creatives in today’s Los Angeles, from the way Jesse Furman collaborates with chefs of various cuisines to create uniquely L.A. bagels to how Pijja Palace blends sports bar culture with Indian flavors. Compared to L.A.’s first taste of fusion in the ‘80s, wherein Wolfgang Puck put smoked salmon on pizza and scooped gingery tuna tartare into caramalized cones at Spago, “I think this wave has more longevity because it’s more intentional,” says Mendieta.
Another important pillar of Out of Thin Air is its mission. Jang partners with Nanoom Christian Fellowship, the rehab center he went to in MacArthur Park—and the only Korean-American rehab center in the U.S.—on a transitional program inspired by Homeboy Industries that encourages recovering addicts to apply to work at the bakery. “Addiction is kind of complicated in the Asian-American community in particular because it’s such a shame-based culture, so nobody really wants to acknowledge that it even exists,” Jang says. For that reason, Nanoom doesn’t have a strong transition process in place. Jang hopes to make it easier for graduates of the program to re-enter society, and in turn, minimize the potential of relapse. Addicts are required to have a sponsor and to have been clean for at least six months in order to work at Out of Thin Air. One of his employees, who does farmers’ market sales, is approaching one year clean and recently checked out of a halfway house, while another, who still lives at Nanoom, stamps all of the bakery’s paper bags.
Eventually, Jang’s plan is to open a brick-and-mortar bakery where grains are milled in-house. As Out of Thin Air grows, they’ll be able to have a greater impact on their mission. “We make a delicious product and I’m really proud of what we do at that level, but how this thing made me grow up as a person is worth more than money for me,” Jang says. None of this, nor the bakery’s current success, would be possible without the support of various communities in Los Angeles, particularly those of Chinatown, Atwater, Calabasas, and Altadena, where Out of Thin Air is a farmers’ market fixture. “They sign up for the journey of the business, not just the single product,” Jang says of his market clientele. “The customers that came to L.A. River when it was just me in my apartment are now seeing the flavors that come from Sage’s work, from Jessica’s work.” As for the croissants, the ride continues this Sunday in Atwater.
